The Campbell Academy Blog (3)

Dentistry is dead….Long live Dentistry

I'm sure you've seen the news lately about the problems in NHS dentistry.

I'm sure you've seen the story about the Ukrainian national who fled her country with her young son for safety and security in the United Kingdom, only to return back close to the front line in Ukraine to get a root canal treatment done that she couldn't afford to have done in the United Kingdom.

I'm sure you've seen the queues in Bristol.

I'm sure you've seen it all.

It looks like dentistry is dying.

It looks like the provision of care for people who need help with that provision is getting worse and, less accessible and more and more problematic.

This is not just dentistry. It's absolutely mirrored through the whole of healthcare.

Recently, I had to access private healthcare myself for a problem with my thyroid and also for a problem with my hand.

I developed an issue with my right hand that could have been problematic and not consistent with being a surgeon, and therefore, I wanted help and advice to see how that might progress.

When I went to see my GP (who was fabulous), he warned me that it would be a long time before I was able to see anyone on the NHS, and it may be that the condition progressed.

Healthcare is in turmoil in the United Kingdom.

One of the main reasons we will struggle moving forward is that we do not have an established private healthcare system (contrary to what you might believe).

Recently, my wife, Alison, was at the gym in one of her classes, and she was speaking to a lady who has a small house in Thailand. On one of her trips to Thailand, the lady she was speaking to developed sepsis, and Alison's immediate reaction was "Oh, my goodness, that must have been terrible in a country with such primitive healthcare."

It turns out Thailand's healthcare is fabulous. It's just private.

And so, the lady was able to attend A&E and, within 15 minutes, had been admitted to ITU.

Imagine that in the NHS in the United Kingdom, if you developed sepsis tomorrow - unlikely.

One of the problems in the United Kingdom, though, is the infrastructure for private healthcare, and so if you did develop sepsis tomorrow and you attended a private hospital, you would immediately have to be transferred to an NHS hospital because the private sector does not have intensive care units that would allow it to be able to provide such treatment to any great degree or in any numbers.

It means that as people choose to access healthcare privately (and I absolutely believe that the wealthier parts of society should), there is no healthcare for them to access at a level that requires serious treatment.

It is likely to take generations for us to be able to develop such a system in order to suck the people out of the NHS who really should be paying for it and to leave the NHS for the people who are unable to afford it and that metaphor is absolutely the same for dentistry.

One of the issues we have in the United Kingdom at the moment is that there is simply not enough NHS dentistry for NHS patients, but as people leave the NHS and decide that, eventually, now they will pay for their dentistry, there is not enough private provision for that.

That feels great at the moment if you're a private dentist or a dentist with some form of a private list, which is running three or six-month waiting lists, but it's not great for the population as a whole, and it's not great for the overall development of dentistry.

New models will now arise.

People who are entrepreneurial will support their time with allied professionals and other technologies to only do the things that are most valuable to them and to allow the delegation of as many tasks as possible to an extended dental team and extended technological infrastructure.

I saw a video recently about UNTIL Health, It's worth a little look and a check out of their video as to what their model is—yet another disruptive model of the delivery of healthcare in the United Kingdom.

Many, many of these will develop soon.

If you are sat in dentistry hoping to turn up five days a week to drill and fill and to make your way to retirement, I suggest you might want to take a little break and think again.

Ten years from now, things will be entirely different from where we are today.